Don't shoot me, I got the WB wrong!

Feb 2, 2017

1 min read

White balance a critical element in photography, is it? Well perhaps so when photographing people and trying to maintain the correct skin tone. Try setting white balance to daylight (5,200K) when taking photos of people under tungsten light and you know what happen, your subjects will be suffering from sun burnt. Similarly using the incorrect white balance for landscape can result in weird and unnatural rendition of landscape. But how critical is it to get the white balance correct? It is important if shooting in j-peg but not so if shooting in raw.

Whilst I try to use the correct white balance most of the time, I sometimes like to experiment with white balance settings particularly in night photography. Most people would either use auto white balance or leave the white balance on daylight. However I have found that the effect of white balance selection can be both quite interesting and refreshing.

Here are some images shot with different white balance settings. Can you identify the setting for each of the images?